Microsoft still working to fix Outlook sync issues

Outlook users are still struggling to get their email clients to synchronise with Microsoft's servers. The outage, which may now be in its sixth day, has left users confused and annoyed, as they have themselves complained on sites such as Down Detector and Down Today. A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "Some …

[Steve Davies 3]

Has El Reg finally soured its relationship with Redmond

The Register has asked Microsoft what the cause of the sync issues was and will update this article if we receive a response.

Those words are normally reserved for getting comments from Apple. We all know that Cupertino does not respond except to say 'Niet', 'Non', 'Nien' etc.

Is MS doing the same now?

It would be nice to know if this site is in the doghouse with two big Tech/IT companies.

A real case of living up to 'Biting the hand that feeds IT'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Has El Reg finally soured its relationship with Redmond

Chip on your shoulder?

[beavershoes]

Re: Has El Reg finally soured its relationship with Redmond

Dude, Outlook is down. W can not get our email. Our businesses are hurting. Microsoft is at fault. Or you can say that we are at fault for choosing Microsoft. Get off that bar stool and understand that we can not just drink our Outlook problems away. FYI our iPhones are working just fine.

[ParasiteParty]

Re: Has El Reg finally soured its relationship with Redmond

"Or you can say that we are at fault for choosing Microsoft."

Yes, that's it. When you go cloud hosted you are subcontracting your responsibility to a third party. We are cloud hosted on an Exchange platform but NOT one that is operated by Microsoft. To my mind the worst place you can have your Exchange mailboxes are Microsoft.

[katrinab]

Re: Has El Reg finally soured its relationship with Redmond

El Reg sent the query by email, but as the article reports, their email isn't working at the moment, so they won't have had a chance to read it.

[hplasm]

Has El Reg finally soured its relationship with Redmond?

Or has MS yet to sync its Outlook mail?

[Alister]

As I posted on the previous story about this, I was able to make Thunderbird work with my Hotmail account by setting up an alias on the account using the outlook.com domain, and logging in with that email address.

The error thrown when trying to connect to my hotmail.co.uk account was Error="AuthFailed:LogonDenied-FederatedStsUnreachable

which suggests that the Federated Trust between the outlook.com domain and other domains like hotmail.co.uk had failed.

[Lee D]

Cool.

So all those IT issues that are common to random sysadmins hit cloud services just as much, but with impacts for millions of customers rather than just a few dozen.

Glad to see that the change management at Microsoft is just as effective...

[Lee D]

Cloud service provider.

Say no more.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Say no more"

Well I will say something: I actually like my Outlook.com account. A lot. I am personally not experiencing this sync issue. In fact since they migrated the service across from Hotmail / Live.com servers to the Office 365 framework then I've got better reliability and almost the same service and functions as my company OWA account, free of charge as well. In fact I'd be happy to pay for it, and it's better than the Gmail and Apps crap I've been using for ages for one of my other activities.

[Lee D]

I paid for Hotmail.

I paid for Opera (back in the day).

I paid for WinZIP.

I pay for any service I deem good.

When Hotmail went to Outlook, I stopped paying and threw it away. GMail was the answer, combined with my own server to manage email. Email actually comes to my GMail and my personal account at the same time. Downtime in the last 10 years? Zero, except scheduled reboots for kernel upgrades.

Yet, my workplaces (one of which was entirely Google Apps, another on-site Exchange AND Google) get downtime all the time. Literally, today, Google Drive threw a wobbly for a long time.

Cloud providers are third-parties. There's nothing wrong with remote servers. There's nothing wrong with hosting multiple servers in disparate geographic locations. There's nothing wrong with having virtualised servers or containers running on other's hardware.

But RELYING on them to always be up - as in this instance - is a nonsense. Deploy Outlook in-house AND in the cloud. And then at very least you can send / receive internal email and use your backup mail servers to send/receive email if you need to.

But putting your eggs into the hands of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or any other single entity to which you represent 0.00000000001% of their annual income is a stupid idea.

Oh, and for four years you couldn't log into Hotmail with a standards-compliant browser (Opera) when it was in its prime of development and had full support for all relevant standards. And the downtime on Hotmail once hit 20 days in one year. And I've seen Google downtimes in the days-per-year category too.

With those kinds of numbers, you're an idiot to rely on cloud alone without your backup MX / database replica being held in-house too. Because, you know what, my last workplace got 99.99% uptime. And we weren't even trying.

[BlartVersenwaldIII]

> Cloud service provider.

>

> Say no more.

I prefer:

Cloud service provider. Pick any two.

[Hans 1]

BB10

Am I the only BB10 user that needs to rename the account to get the f*er to reconnect properly ? Every other week, BB10 reports ([f]outlook.com has stopped responding), simply renaming to name[i], where [i] is an integer, works. As in, it refuses to honor the BB10 keep-alive.

B@stards cannot be trusted ... I am sure this is "as MS designed it". I am sure I could reboot the phone also, which I never do ... I'm never run out of battery ...

This started happening about a month ago ... and I have NOT updated BB10 since ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...

Its at least nice to know that even Microsoft can't get Exchange to work properly.

[Paul IT]

Fixed Hotmail on Outlook 2013

Yesterday, I was helping a lady where Outlook 2013 had EAS connections to two Hotmail accounts. One of the Hotmail accounts was connecting and syncing and the other could not.

Could not explain or understand the issue at all.

So created an alias in outlook.com for the faulty EAS Hotmail account and created a new Outlook user profile and able to sync Hotmail using outlook.office365.com exchange account using the new alias email address. Added the other Hotmail account, which also used outlook.office365.com and both started working again.

The lady received an email from Microsoft last week about recreating a new Outlook email profile because of Office365 reconfiguration of Hotmail but I wasn't expecting it to break it so soon.

[davidp231]

Now if only they can fix the horrific Outlook.com interface...

[TaabuTheCat]

New SLA Needed - TTR (Time to Remediate)

One of the interesting things I notice watching the O365 "Health" status is just how long it takes Microsoft to fully remediate an issue. You'll see an issue get opened and normally diagnosed quickly (within hours, sometimes a day), and then a patch developed for what's normally a regression caused by some other work that's been done. And then you wait. And I mean wait. I've seen many issues take WEEKS to get fully deployed. MS dutifully keeps you notified of progress (X% complete, day after day), but if your account happens to be at the end of that repair chain you are waiting a REALLY long time to get your service restored.

It's one of the interesting things about cloud services I don't hear many people talk about, and that's the time it takes to repair a massive amount of infrastructure even when know how and have a fix available. I expect this to only get worse as the cloud continues to grow.

[Diginerd]

Azure... Aptly named

Blue sky & no cloud!

[ecofeco]

Re: Azure... Aptly named

It was right in front of us the whole time.

Good catch!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Azure... Aptly named

Some serious out of the box blue sky thinking happened here.

Have +1 to your commentard KPI.

We'll discuss a possible reward at your next performance catch up.

[David 45]

Log-in problems

My "live.com" address was OK using Thunderbird, both incoming and outgoing, but my "hotmail.co.uk" address wouldn't accept log-in details from Thunderbird yesterday, giving an error, although (strangely enough) it was fine when I went to the web page. Just had an update for Thunderbird come through. Coincidence, or connected with the mail problem? Either way, the "hotmail.co.uk" address seems to be working OK again.

[Edgar Scrutton]

I use several OS's: Os/2Warp, eComStation, Windows 7, and Ubutu.

Mozilla Thunderbird or SeaMonkey are my favorite email clients

My Hotmail has been a challenge this past several days. I found a solution .. at least on a W7 machine (Ubuntu, OS/2 and other W7) machines would work, was to make sure the TLS 1.0 was enabled.

I wonder if some 'upgrades' turn this off going to a higher level for security or not. Anyway this worked for me here on this combination of software.

[razorfishsl]

in the last 3 months 365 has barely been working for more than a couple of days, without some sort of "impact"

lets not even get into the fact that now "skype" accounts are being locked out, if they happen to be using an email address that 365 is running under & controlling.